Untitled Document
One of the poignant questions that hurricane Katrina raises is this: How could
so many people be so poor for so long without anybody noticing? Poverty is just
as invisible in New York City. The last five years of the 1990s were widely touted
as years of a spectacular boom. Yet when Census 2000 was released, it revealed
that poverty in New York City has increased by 10% during the course of the 1990s.
How could the euphoria of the boom be reconciled with the alarming census figures?
A New York Times front-page article claimed that the census figures drew a
distorted picture. The conditions of New Yorkers who were long-term residents
of the U.S. must have improved, the experts the article quoted argued, but as
a result they moved "up and out." These affluent long-term residents
were then replaced by poor new immigrants, and hence the higher poverty figures.
"Immigration Cut Into Income in New York, Census Finds," was the article's
headline. The truth is, the census found no such thing.
In fact, the census figures that were released at the time did not distinguish
between the incomes of new immigrants and the rest of New Yorkers.
The data that does permit distinguishing between the incomes the two groups
has now been released. What do the figures show? Poverty increased for both
groups over the 1990s, but among New Yorkers who have been in the country at
least ten years the increase in the poverty rate was 14% whereas among new immigrants
the increase was "only 3%. The actual rates for either group are thus catastrophically
high. More than a fifth of New Yorkers who were long term U.S. residents of
the U.S. in 1999 (the figures of the 2000 census were collected during the preceding
year) and more than a quarter of recent immigrants were living below the poverty
threshold.
Why did New Yorkers lose ground in the 1990s? Because at the time that
all levels of government were enjoying unprecedented budget surpluses these
governments engaged in a frontal attack against the wages of the lowest paid
workers. The most damaging was probably the attack on welfare, which provides
workers their last defense against job offers that are too low. Welfare
reform was implemented by the Clinton administration, but the Giuliani administration
implemented its own version of it with particular vengeance. It pushed 250,000
destitute New York workers off welfare and into the low-wage job market between
1995 and 2000.
During the 1990s the pace of privatization also increased significantly,
and this meant that jobs that could have been filled by relatively well paid
public employees went to the low paid workers of private contractors.
Between 1989 and 2000 the number of private social service jobs increased to
110,000, a 61% increase. While not all these private workers produce governmental
services, a large part of the funding of social service agencies comes from
government. Another sector that saw increased privatization was sanitation.
The number of Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs, organizations that provide
sanitation services in select neighborhoods, more than doubled. Whereas the
starting hourly for a city sanitation worker is $13 with full benefits, the
BIDs often pay the minimum wage or near the minimum wage, and often with no
benefits.
The 1990s saw also a new phenomenon that came with welfare reform. This was
the replacement of government employees with individuals who are forced to work,
and not for a wage but for a welfare check. By law, these forced workers are
not permitted to unionize and are not eligible to receive the earned income
tax credit. In 1999 the city employed directly 33,000 workfare workers in jobs
previously or in some cases currently done by city employees who work alongside
them. Finally, despite its image as a high-wage state, the New York,s minimum
wage in 1999 was stuck at $5.15.
Unfortunately, while the 1990s are over, the rate of poverty in New York is
virtually unchanged. The latest figures released by the Census Bureau show that
in 2004 a fifth of all New Yorkers were still living in poverty. And it couldn,t
be otherwise, since none of the policies that contributed to poverty have been
reversed.
Welfare is still seen as a "giveaway" instead of an integral part
of a wage policy, privatization continues, and while the minimum wage was raised,
it is now $6/hour, far from sufficient to pull anybody out of poverty. To
fight poverty the government will have to switch from attacking workers to siding
with them.